


Words Writ Across Centuries

by sanerontheinside



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, Gen, Post-War, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Time Travel, haha have a rarepair, restructured magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-28
Updated: 2017-02-28
Packaged: 2018-09-27 10:20:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10009316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanerontheinside/pseuds/sanerontheinside
Summary: Soulmarks across time.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I was playing around with an idea at one point for soulmarks that were time-displaced. The idea left room for platonic and one-sided soulmates as a matter of course: you could pick up a book by an author long-gone and understand the author more clearly through those pages than a historian who'd put decades of work into it. You could read old letters and your answers to them might invariably ring more true and earnest than whatever reply they received in turn from their correspondent. JKR's 'verse has portraits. 
> 
> Of course, in most universes, this only works in one direction. Thus, time travel.  
> Well, in this particular case. Usually, in the case of fae and other magical beings, simply patience. 
> 
> This short story was set off by the following: _"What if the words on your skin aren’t the first thing that your soulmate says to you, but the first thing they say that no one else has said to you before?"_  
>  (Personally I think soulmarks are flexible and more related to the individual in this AU in particular.)

Minerva McGonagall huffed out a breath, collapsing into her armchair heavily, throwing her feet up onto the ottoman as she sank into the cushions. Last day of the year, farewell to the seventh years—all in all, she’d been on her feet for far too many hours to count, and her bones were full of opinions on the whole of this ‘getting old’ business. She didn’t like the feel of those opinions.  


“Welcome home. Long day?” a smooth voice asked, sympathetic but smiling warmly.

“Long _year,_ ” Minerva scowled. “Finally rid of the Marauders, though. They’ve served out their seven years’ time, and all my best to them—may they never show their faces here again.”

“Don’t look now, one of them may yet come back to teach,” came the gleeful parry.

Minerva all but groaned, “Oh, gods forbid. Their children will be bad enough.”

“Indeed. ‘Vera, have a glass of brandy, or maybe butterbeer, why don’t you?”

Professor McGonagall’s head shot up, revealing a challenging gleam in her eye. “Are you about to tell me I look tired?”

The portrait laughed—a dark, warm, delightful alto, as the woman threw back her head, wrinkling her nose a little. “Pfft, how rude. I’d have said tense, or maybe punch-drunk.”

Minerva inclined her head to one side gently. “Acceptable,” she conceded, pushing herself out of her slump and onto her feet. Shuffling over to the cabinet she reached up above her head, vertebrae popping pleasantly.

“Dumbledore misplaced your brandy again,” the portrait added. “Look not on thy left.”

 _“Not?”_ Minerva threw an irritated glare over her shoulder, but the portrait merely shrugged a shoulder. “What in Merlin’s beard does that mean?”

“Merlin’s beard was not so thick as to contain all of Dumbledore’s eccentricities.” Minerva smirked, hearing again the light wrinkling of her companion’s nose in the tone as she withdrew her wand and waved it over the left-hand compartment. “That is the extent of the warning I am permitted to give, all loopholes considered.”

“He left you loopholes?”

“No, of course not. Crafty damned crusty old trickster.”

“Oi!” Minerva snapped.

“What? Where is it untrue?” The portrait chuckled, wriggling in her seat like a pleased cat. “Look, you’re not allowed to speak ill of the Headmaster—professionalism and all that—so best it’s an old unidentified portrait does it for you, no?”

“I do believe you are unnecessarily venomous,” she pointed out with a sigh. “You still haven’t explained why, by the way.”

There was a strangely long pause, long enough for Minerva to break into the cabinet—neutralising a mild Stinging Hex that might have been rather nasty at full efficacy. It also apparently held a Trace Charm of some sort. Pouring a couple fingers of brandy into a tumbler, Minerva turned around and leaned back against the smooth dark oak, twirling the glass gently in midair and giving her portrait-friend a steady look.

The mysterious lady she’d only known as Ana for the last three years looked pensive, hunting for the edges of a mind skittering frustratingly out of reach. ‘Ana’ was as much the woman’s name as Vera was hers, but it was one of the remaining traces of memory the portrait still had.

The woman in the portrait cleared her throat. “A feeling I get, Vera. I’m sorry, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to tell you more than that.”

“Something to do with the past?”

Ana shrugged. “Must be. Maybe not. Drink up, Vera, and put your feet up, or go to sleep,” she said gently. “Try to make it an early night, at least. I’ll leave you your privacy.”

And with that slight bow just short of stiff that spoke of a completely different time period, the lady rose to regally float out of her frame.

Minerva sighed and shook her head at the empty painting, swirling the brandy thoughtfully. She had plenty to do even now, but Ana’s advice was awfully tempting.

  


* * *

  


Three years ago, a ragged canvas had been given to Hogwarts for repair and safekeeping. That had been a dark year, one of the most difficult in recent memory. Death Eater attacks had grown markedly more frequent and vicious. Sometimes, left with little more than decimated holdings and unwilling to give them up to the goblins of Gringotts (for goblins will always lay claim to that which their hands have touched), survivors would offer their last damaged treasures to the school.

Professor Flitwick had been especially overjoyed by the acquisition of a portrait—“Perhaps some distant ancestor? Great-grandaunt? Hard to say. I’m so sorry, Professor, I don’t remember a thing about it, it was in the attic when the house burned.” The masterpiece was the work of an unknown artist, a portrait of an unidentified sitter—and the mystery behind this painting was made all the more tantalising by the fact that it was in dire need of restoration.

Actually, ‘restoration’ didn’t even begin to describe the level of devoted care this painting required. It had suffered fire damage, and (Flitwick guessed) more than once. (Later he would also add that some beast had gone at the paint, scraping at it with a blunt object, as if someone had gone to incredible lengths to destroy a magical object astonishingly capable of protecting itself.) The canvas had been torn, as though with an insufficiently sharp blade—a claw, perhaps? Had the Dark Lord, champion of the Pure-blooded, thrown in his lot with Werewolves now, too? But thoughts of the war were pushed far from his mind as he ran his fingers gingerly over the frame.

Even then, the portrait had still held signs of some sort of magic holding it together. One of the other professors had suggested simply destroying it outright, and McGonagall found herself cringing in almost real pain. Flitwick readily agreed with her, but even after two minutes his motives had been perfectly obvious: he’d taken on the task of—easily—one of the most daunting restorations of the age.

Over the course of the next year, several experts in Charms and Portraiture, as well as the esteemed author of _A History of Magic in Art,_ had been permitted into Filius’ workshop to assist with the restoration. Minerva visited every few days, drawn to the painting in a way she couldn’t put her finger on—to the person under all that damage, to the strange feeling it gave her, of warmth and peace and connection. Minerva was quick to brush those fanciful thoughts out of her head, but they persisted, pulling her down the corridors to Flitwick’s door more and more often.

Filius was glad of the company, however—especially once the portrait started talking. At first it was a torn, rasping voice in barely audible syllables. The sound was haunting, startling the Charms Professor every now and then after long periods of silence, when he’d forgotten about his companion. It took Minerva an embarrassingly long time to realise what it was: a soft whisper-thin singing, half the words lost. The tune seemed hauntingly familiar. Flitwick, once she’d explained and even tried to hum the melody, went awfully pale and turned to apologise to the torn painting profusely.

“The fire was started by some runaway spell, probably,” he explained, frenetic, rummaging in a cupboard among various paints. “I’m not sure any of her companion portraits still exist—she may have had nowhere else to go but back to this wreckage after a time, poor dear.”

Minerva had rarely seen him so excited, finally having hit upon a problem to solve. Though, she thought, at this rate he risked appearing unsympathetic. So she turned to the torn canvas and started speaking to it. For a moment, she had the sense of startled silence. Then something in her chest unknotted and relaxed, and Minerva drew in the first full breath since she’d seen the tattered canvas. She asked questions, slowly put together the halting answers into a story. It was a broken narrative at best, but better than nothing.

Within a few months, Flitwick had the canvas fully mended, and was doing his best to strip away the soot. It was slow going—impossible in the Muggle world, Minerva reflected. Filius was happy to entertain her questions while he worked, and Minerva had plenty. After all, the woman in the portrait would have heard them too, and Minerva wanted to reassure her that she was in good hands. This wasn’t the ordinary sort of restoration he usually performed for dust-choked Hogwarts portraits, Filius readily admitted. Ordinarily with damage this severe he would have preferred to simply paint another, but without knowing the subject of this painting he hesitated to lose any more of the magic worked into the paint and canvas that yet remained. It held an identity, after all.

Or pieces of one, as Minerva was beginning to discover. As the portrait gradually came into being, the voice seemed to heal and become smoother, more musical. Her answers became less stilted and uncertain, sounded less like she’d been half-choked with smoke. But every now and then the woman would stop in the middle of a sentence, and even without seeing her face Minerva could tell she was bewildered.

“I don’t remember,” she admitted at last. “I don’t remember my own name.”

By then, Flitwick already had a shape: a proud, straight-backed lady, her features yet unclear, but her character already well in evidence. She seemed to take the memory loss lightly on the surface of it, settling for the name of ‘Ana’ because it bore some familiarity. But the casual acceptance made Minerva’s heart ache, so she stayed a little longer that day.

“I’d always been afraid of losing my mind as I aged,” Ana admitted at last, surprisingly mild. “Did you know, Rowena had the very same fear?”

McGonagall shifted in surprise. “No, I didn’t know.”

“Mm. Her fears were well-founded. Her mother began losing her memory not long after thirty. That, you see, is the riddle of the diadem—it’s of only marginal use to most people because their minds are in nearly peak form. As one ages, it becomes more useful. But alas, she never took time to make the effects more permanent, and gradually came to rely on the diadem until even that could not help her.”

McGonagall sat in nonplussed silence for a long moment.

“I can remember that, and not my own name,” the voice remarked after a little while, with a faint bitter edge to the words. “I can’t even remember how I know that.”

“I’m sure it will come back,” Minerva hurried to reassure her. After all, voice and awareness had returned as the canvas came together. By now, it was like looking at a silhouette posed in a dark room.

The shadowed figure only shook her head gently, and Minerva had the sense that she was smiling. “No, I don’t think it will. But that’s alright. You’ve given me something new to remember.”

  


* * *

  


Ana’s easy acceptance was just as well: it turned out that while Flitwick was positive he could reconstruct her form, that she might regain her memories with her appearance wasn’t something anyone could say with certainty. Already, Flitwick had mentioned once or twice, rather uneasily, that this was like no portrait he’d ever seen or worked on. He was careful not to bring it up where his subject might have heard him, usually drawing Minerva away to Hogsmeade for a butterbeer and a chance to complain—or confide.

“She’s a painted library!” he’d exclaimed once—though he was careful to keep his voice to an excited whisper all the same. “She knows so _much,_ it’s almost terrifying. None of the portraits I’ve ever worked with had so much knowledge stored.”

“But don’t they all know the goings on, or, say—the history of Hogwarts?” Minerva had asked him then.

Flitwick shrugged. “At best they have a reliable memory of about a month. You want an account for what happened three years ago, you ask a ghost. A portrait is a bit like a Pensieve,” he’d told her. “Not all the memories of the sitter can be kept in it. It’s like awareness of your self in the moment, without going hunting for your childhood memories.”

“But she has no memories,” Minerva countered.

“Oh, I think she does. She just doesn’t realise they’re hers.” He’d been treated to a blank stare at that, so he pushed aside his butterbeer and endeavoured to explain: “She remembers many things in such great detail, you’d think she was there to see them happen. She speaks of Rowena as a peer. I can’t place the date on the painting—the paint was badly damaged, but I don’t think it’s her first restoration. I tried to date the canvas, though.”

For a long moment Filius stared down at his hands, saying nothing. He started at Minerva’s pointed “And?” and shook himself off.

“Minerva, she’s older than the school.”

There wasn’t really a way to verify Flitwick’s estimate, but he believed it wholeheartedly. In a little while, so, too, did Minerva.

But she found herself convinced over a far less esoteric thing than paint or canvas dating. No, late one night she’d tripped over the leg of the cabinet on the far end of the room while looking for something small and terribly unimportant. At the time, it had been a horrible nuisance, the last in a long week that was about to break her.

So, with a near-miss at breaking a toe, Minerva had dropped all pretense of having the situation well in hand and broken out swearing in a hissing stream of Scots Gaelic. Minerva had never accounted for how her new friend might take it, and guiltily remembered her presence partway through her litany as she hopped around to lean back against the low cabinet. She half-expected a scandalised stare or a polite look in the other direction.

Instead, Ana was grinning like the rough language was music to her ears. “Where are you from?” she asked, eyes shining with glee and warmth like she’d just heard a bit of home.

“Caithness.” Minerva grinned, a touch relieved that her litany hadn’t been met with the disapproval she might expect from other school portraits, and truly pleased to see Ana wracking her brain for whatever memory she might have of Gaelic or Caithness.

Quite a lot of memory, as it turned out. Minerva listened, hovering frustratingly just on the edge of understanding. When Ana fell silent, she looked up to find her fretting, puzzled and a little disappointed.

“Sorry, I thought I remembered that right. Sometimes, though, even neighbours don’t understand each other. Maybe it’s not Caithness.” Ana shrugged it off, but the frown persisted.

Minerva drew in a deep breath. She hadn’t discussed this with Ana yet, and neither had Flitwick. “Filius believes your portrait predates Hogwarts.”

“Hogwarts?” Ana blinked. “Of course it does. I watched them plan—oh.”

It was Minerva’s turn to frown, wide-eyed and chilled. “Plan—the school?”

“I must have been in Rowena’s keeping,” Ana muttered, looking miserable. “How else would I know about the memory problems, the diadem?”

She switched to Irish Gaelic, colouring the air with a few choice words that left Minerva’s ears tingling. Desperate to lighten the mood, the professor coughed primly and raised her eyebrows. “Well, I’d have to be an idiot not to understand _that,_ ” she said, and got a faint smile for her efforts.

But the lightening of mood seemed only momentary, Watching Ana stare past her, out the window at the cottage’s small garden, twisting her hands in her lap, Minerva felt a twinge of sympathy for the unknown lady who had so quickly become her friend.

Then dark, quick, intelligent eyes focused on her with razor-sharp intent, and Ana grinned. “Very well, then. Think you can teach me a new dialect?”

Minerva didn’t fancy herself much of a linguist, or a teacher of languages, but her student was hardly a beginner and quite inventive.

And, Minerva thought, she would forever respect the portrait of an unknown lady who’d found a way to make Alastor Moody blush.

  


* * *

  


Soulmarks were a tricky thing, Minerva knew. Sometimes they hovered in the realm of possibility, unresolved, possible and impossible, a small rune-mark on your skin. Sometimes they danced along the wrist, and sometimes they settled on your back. Sometimes they crawled up your arm and twisted like cats’ tails, tickled like fur. They had a life of their own, and sometimes they changed, grew into flowers or dragonfly wings.

Sometimes, if you were lucky—or, as she was beginning to suspect in her case, very deeply unfortunate—the runes might grow into a string of words, resolve into visible, understandable lettering.

Some time after Flitwick had completed the portrait, he was looking for a place to put it. How to even begin to explain that the author and subject of this masterpiece were both unknown? Not that many students ever asked. He could have asked her to keep the entry to some remote tower or set of rooms, but the lady didn’t seem to do well at all when she was lonely.

Filius was overjoyed when Minerva offered to give the mysterious lady a home in her cottage. “She likes you,” he confided, the words standing out from the outpouring of sincere relief and joy and enthusiasm. She felt an odd flutter in her chest at that, one echoed in a gentle sweep at her inner left wrist. Minerva dismissed both those feelings, though. They’d let her down before.

It wasn’t until the evening that she even thought to glance at her left forearm—usually sleeve-covered or cuff-hidden.

_You’ve given me something new to remember._

That soft, gentle voice echoed in her ears and a sudden chill ran down her spine and across her shoulders. Great gods, she thought, and quickly hid the words away, as if that way she could deny ever having seen them in the first place.

  


* * *

  


Some years later, she came into her sitting room to find Elphinstone Urquart engaged in a heated debate with the charming portrait of Lady Ana. Ana was a fiery conversationalist as ever, but her knowledge on the subject of Hogwarts Houses was unparalleled. Her views on the many myths that had polluted and warped the modern perception of Salazar Slytherin and Rowena Ravenclaw were always a topic that took the room by storm.

Especially since, in recent years, it was becoming apparent that Lady Ana was more often right than not. Minerva had taken great care not to mention the few barely-pieced-together memories that Ana had of hanging somewhere in Rowena’s rooms. There had been a fire at Hogwarts, “My first,” Ana had explained. “You don’t quite forget that.”

(“You forget everything else.”)

Elphinstone had then taken Minerva on their customary stroll about the Black Lake. Last year, he’d proposed at the end of the summer. This year felt like a ritual, an attempt to begin again.

To his credit, she’d even forgotten all about last year, and all about whatever his possible intentions, by the end of the evening. But that night she shuffled down to the sitting room again and sat down in her armchair, gathering up her cold feet to tuck them under her and nursing a warm mug of tea in her lap.

“I like him,” Ana said quietly.

“He proposed, last year,” Minerva answered, just as quietly. “He’s likely to do it again this year.”

“But?”

But what, really? She was sitting in a dark room, talking to a portrait of a woman without a name and hardly a trace of personal memory. There were words on her skin that could have been said by anyone (except that they had already been said), a cold feel to her skin and a sharp lancing pain in her chest.

“I don’t know,” Minerva whispered.

Ana said nothing.

  


* * *

  


“You need to get up, Minerva.” The voice was soft, even comforting, but there was no hiding the undercurrent of worry. If Minerva had spared but a glance in the portrait’s direction, she would have seen Ana’s pale gaze, sympathetic and somewhat frustrated by her rather limited existence. She wanted to reach out and wrap her arms about her friend’s shoulders, to be the one to stir the embers when the fire burned low, to be the one to gently raise Minerva to her feet and lead her to the couch at least, wrap her in a warm blanket and stand guard over her dreams at night.  

As it was, Minerva McGonagall stared straight ahead into the fireplace. For a moment her gaze shifted to the door of the cottage, as if expecting someone to walk through it at any moment and reassure her that the last three days had been an awful, awful nightmare. No one came, of course. Only that soft voice from the far wall kept calling her back.

“Three years,” she rasped.

Unseen, Ana’s shoulders sloped down in relief: for the first time in three days—since the funeral—she’d spoken. “What about three years?”

Minerva let out a bitter-sounding scoff that Ana didn’t like the sound of one jot. “Three years of marriage. Of contentment. All lost, to a Venomous Tentacula bite.”

And she’d watched the man fade away in pain for three long days.

“Oh…” Ana seemed genuinely surprised by the outburst. As if she’d forgotten how long it had taken for Minerva to even have a sense of comfort.

“You didn’t realise?” She felt unaccountably hurt by it, as though it had been a careless gesture on the part of a friend.

“No, not—” Ana stuttered, then took a breath to regain her composure. “Time looks different to a portrait, Vera. Forgive me, my friend.”

Minerva suddenly felt a wash of guilt—of course a portrait wouldn’t experience time the way the living did. Of course a portrait who’d lost so much of her memory wouldn’t even have that for a reference point. She’d lashed out in her grief at the one constant friend she’d known for far longer than she’d even been married. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried hard not to give in to another threatening wave of tears.

“Please, Minerva,” Ana continued to insist, “you have to get up.”

The words fell from her before she could stop them. “Would you help me?”

Only silence met them. Mortified, Minerva slowly raised her head, not really sure what to expect, but what she saw only sent another spike of pain to her chest. Ana didn’t look stricken, or pained, or even surprised; just terribly sad.

“There’s no one I could fetch from the castle whom you’d want to see,” she sighed, shaking her head. “All I can do is stay with you, Minerva. Or leave, if you ask me to. Tell me what you need, and I’ll see what I can do.”

Minerva shook her head, grasping the edge of the couch and pulling herself up to her feet slowly. “Please stay,” she said finally, her voice a harsh, rasping whisper. “I don’t want to remember this without you.”

For a few days, neither spoke beyond a quiet ‘good morning’ or whispered ‘good night’. Minerva first broke the heavy silence between them later that week, with a question.

“I’ll be leaving the cottage,” she said, keeping her eyes on her chair so that she could still just track Ana’s movements out of the corner of her eye. The woman sat stone-still, head cocked to one side, rather like a cat listening for something on the edge of audible. “I was wondering if you wanted to come with me.”

Now she had the distinct impression that Ana was looking right at her, waiting. Waiting for what? Minerva turned slowly in place, lifted her head, then slowly let her eyes track up from the bare spot of wall just above the floor.

Waiting for her, apparently. When she finally met the portrait’s gaze, Ana granted her a smile so warm it nearly melted her to her toes. “Vera, you’re the only living, breathing person I’ve spoken to consistently in the last few years. Of course I want to stay with you, if you’ll have me.”

  


* * *

  


Rebuilding Hogwarts was a trial and a half. Every now and then people still accidentally walked into old curfew alarms and a few nasty curses, and it was really too soon to be bringing students back into the castle. But whatever magic had held it since the days the Founders laid down the cornerstone, it seemed that the castle was pulling itself back together slowly and healing, and even the better for having more people around.

If only that could be said of the people themselves.

Minerva had seen two wars, and untimely deaths in the intervening years of peace. If there was one companion she thought she might be permitted to keep, it was the portrait of the clever, auburn-haired, dark-eyed woman, who made words crawl over her skin and made her laugh when there was little left to laugh about. She’d spent years getting used to the idea that her soulmate was a lady without her own memories, with a sharp tongue and wild eyes, who spoke so many different dialects of Gaelic and sometimes, absently, slipped into Welsh, and occasionally cursed the damned Saxons for ever existing. A lady with more knowledge of the Wizarding World’s history than the library, even if it was mostly in pieces. Even if her portrait had been damaged at least thrice-over by fires and stray curses and occasional hateful vandalism.

Minerva still cursed herself for asking Ana for help.

“What could I possibly do?” she’d asked in surprise. “I’m a portrait, I can’t change anything in your world.”

“You’ve changed it by being here and speaking to me every night, Ana,” she sniped, a little annoyed. A stunned silence met her pronouncement, and when she looked up, Ana seemed surprised and awed.

“Sorry,” she said, much to Minerva’s astonishment.

“For what?”

“I never got around to thinking myself a portrait. Not useful, I mean. Not beyond my limitations.” Her voice was shaking. “Just that, you’ve—never treated me like one.”

Minerva gaped at her. “I—I never thought a portrait should have been any different.”

Ana surreptitiously swiped away something from her eye, possibly a tear she’d not wanted her to see. “No, well, not really,” she said, trying for lightness and failing terribly. “We’re just echoes, after all, of people long gone. But, um—what did you want to ask?”

Minerva would forever curse the day she asked Ana to spy for her. Ana was by no means careless, but even she could never stand to see a student hurt. That was the day she’d learned that a portrait with many years of collected knowledge about the school could as easily summon walls and guardians to do her bidding as Minerva might ask the castle to defend itself.

That was also the day that the Carrow twins had attempted to slice the painting in half. They’d failed, but only just. It was also the day that Severus Snape, seeing something unusual in the painting, had sent it off to the Department of Mysteries.

 _Good luck getting her back from there,_ Minerva told herself grimly.

Rebuilding and repairing Hogwarts and Hogsmeade was heavy work, and it occupied her mind well enough. The trouble was coming back to her silent rooms at the end of the day, no words of welcome at the door, no off-colour quips, no piecing together the changes wrought by a several hundred years’ gap in language.

  


* * *

  


They’d had days—actually weeks, by now—free of caterwauling alarms at Hogsmeade. It must have been at least the fourth hour of the morning, cold and dark and dismal, when Minerva started awake to one of the Order’s coins vibrating loudly on her nightstand. They’d been keyed to warn of intruders, and amusingly the alarms the Death Eaters left behind had been quite efficient. Minerva and Filius had spent a great deal of time undoing them, but they’d replaced those alarms with wards of their own.

This was one they’d missed, apparently.

The Aurors were already there, shouting and deliberately not-panicking as though they were in over their heads. Minerva knew that mad scramble all too well—the look of people you were supposed to trust, trying to prevent the panic spreading from within their own inner circle. She had no patience for that.

Certainly not when a blast of _something_ sent three of them flying through the air.

 _Idiots,_ Minerva thought, stepping into the gap boldly. Maybe stupidly, too.

It was a woman in the center of this circle, staring about her like someone hunted, desperate to _protect—_ _but what is she protecting?_ Minerva wondered—her face set in an exceptionally familiar expression.

 _That_ face. That auburn hair. Those eyes.

Those stormy grey eyes that flicked up at her and studied her with an incredibly sharp focus, and, painfully, without recognition. That look was a touch wild and _other,_ in a way that made Minerva’s bones hum and her skin crawl. No child growing up in Caithness wouldn’t know what those eyes were, what they _meant,_ even if they’d been fortunate never to encounter the Fair Folk. This was not the portrait of an unknown lady, safe to befriend, holding memories of centuries past and remembering nothing of herself. This was _not_ safe, not even remotely close to it.

But there was one thing she could do, and damned if she wasn’t going to stop a few idiot Aurors who’d forgotten all the lessons about _leaving Fae alone_ from getting themselves killed.

She hadn’t just taught her portrait-friend her modernised Scots Gaelic, she’d also been careful to learn the differences that time had wrought. So she slowly lowered her wand, pointing it to the ground at her feet, and tried for the first time to speak across centuries.

Something about the words might still have been off, Minerva realised. The fae dropped her arms, silent, and took a shaky half-step back. Then, slowly, she took her eyes off the people around her and tipped back her head to look up at the stars.

 _They would have moved,_ Minerva realised. The stars would have moved, and if you knew how they moved you could guess the length of time. Or maybe there was something to Divination after all, something they’d lost and forgotten long ago.

 _Tell me the year,_ Ana had asked once. Ana had no use for years, since she couldn’t really even mark the passage of one, save by Minerva’s New Years’ celebrations, or the last day of school. Minerva had seen heartbreak on that face before. She steeled herself, ready to see it again, and made herself say the numbers.

The stare Minerva got for it reminded her oddly of Mad-Eye. The quiet swearing that followed it, however, pulled a shocked laugh from her. She’d heard those words before, and a great many more. At least that was familiar.

The fae was staring at her with a half-smile on her face, almost a look of understanding. Then, slowly, as if piecing together the language still from gods only knew what whispers the wind carried, she said, “I have the oddest feeling, both that I remember you, and that I do not.”

That gave her an odd twinge. “There was a portrait,” Minerva began, and suddenly realised she had no idea how to continue.

The woman grinned brightly—something sharp and feral, but already warmer and kinder, as if the wildness had been pushed out of the way for curiosity to take its place. “Merlin’s work,” she said, before her expression turned bitter. “So something survived, after all.”

Minerva had the sharp sense, of war, of the terrible knowledge that it had been lost, that all she’d sought to protect had faded away from existence. She was surrounded by people who spoke a language not quite her enemy’s, but clearly derived from it.

She had the sense, suddenly, of looking at herself, which was utterly disturbing. Tall, stronger than she looked, burning with a golden fire that none of the others around her seemed to share. _Child of fae,_ she heard, and her jaw nearly dropped.

For her own sanity, she chose to ignore it.

“What—what do I call you?” Minerva asked.

The ancient being, surrounded by people who could never dare hope to hold her if she wanted to leave, only stood for a long moment and watched Minerva with an indulgent look. Minerva already knew, of course. It wasn’t difficult to piece together, between the echo of a name that sounded like ‘Ana’ and the mention of Merlin, and the sense of a failed war. It wasn’t difficult to figure out from even half an awareness of history, as her father had once taught it to her. Muggle history, but still the history of her home.

“Morgan,” the being answered at last, seemingly satisfied that Minerva had long ago reached that conclusion on her own. “Call me Morgan.”

  


* * *

  


Years later, between the various violent uprisings that still tried to claim the Wizarding World, between the rediscovery of ‘Old Magic’, seeping in through the cracks to replace what Voldemort and his fanatics had broken apart and destroyed, Morgan had taken root in the old cottage at the banks of the Black Lake. She walked rings around it with Minerva at her side, and they argued fiercely over how the Wizarding World had changed, and how magic was now taught.

The wilds of fae temper faded over time, leashed behind years of experience and mostly hidden away when not provoked. Minerva had honestly expected worse. She’d met a woman with memories not quite as damaged as her portrait’s, but time travel, as it turned out, was not very kind. But beside that, Morgan had been just as war-torn as the rest of them, and just as uprooted. This world was not her own, and even Minerva felt she barely recognised it sometimes. She didn’t have quite that level of disconnect, but at least she had a sketch of an idea. Temper was hardly surprising for a fae. For someone whose world had been so completely overturned, in a way it was simply to be expected.

Morgan’s anger still broke things, it twisted around the roots of trees in vines and saplings shot up from the ground at her feet. Minerva’s anger was slow, but with time and with a trading of lessons, the power of it grew. It worried the water of the lake enough to startle the natives, and on one memorable occasion their argument was interrupted by a hissing chorus of agitated Mermish. When Morgan turned her burning eyes on them, still caught up in her wild temper, they’d quieted and slunk away without further comment, but Minerva watched Morgan’s hands unclench, watched the line of her shoulders as she consciously tried to relax tense muscles in her back and neck.

“It’s not any easier, is it?” she dared to ask. “Feeling like this world is not your own?”

“Feeling like I can pass through every barrier your people laughably term their ‘defences’?” Morgan shook her head. “Like I can do with my hands what you’ve never done with a wand? You’ve lost so much, and you don’t even know it. By denying such an enormous part of your history, how can you ever expect to protect yourselves from another Dark Lord?” She turned, starting to make her way back to the house. “How can you ever expect to repair the damage he left behind?”

“Do you want to go back?” Minerva called after her, once again greatly daring. At times she wasn’t sure how she still stood, when the power of this much older, much more powerful being could literally grow forests in empty meadows and move mountains if she was persuasive enough.

Morgan stopped, and turned around again, looking terribly lost and vulnerable. “I’m not sure I could. It was an accidental combination of two forms of magic that should never have mixed. I know how I got here, but I don’t think I could do it on my own.”

Then the lost look faded, and a wicked little grin danced over her face like dappled sunlight. “Besides, it’s not so awful here as all that. At least I have someone to argue with.”

 _Someone worthy,_ Minerva heard, and felt a warm rush in her chest.

“And that’s another thing,” Morgan went on. “I’d be going back to a cause that, I now know, failed. Did it fail because I was not there? Did it fail because I _was_ there? If I go back knowing what I know now, what would I change? Would you be the same person I met here, when I finally trekked through the several hundred years in between?”

Minerva stopped in her tracks, confused. “What could I possibly have to do with your decision?”

Morgan shrugged. “I’ve come here straight out of a war, to the end of a very long one. My magic and my people vanished, maybe even died out, for several hundred years. But now—it’s come back. It’s not quite the same as it used to be, but that’s alright, because it’s not meant to be old. Magic is meant to evolve.”

Again she stopped, and turned to face her companion. Minerva had the sense of the world around them falling away, of distractions receding and quieting. “This is new to me, as well, Minerva. Something new to remember.”

They weren’t, quite, the words she remembered. They weren’t quite the words on her wrist. But if she dared believe the implication behind them, the meaning was very much the same.

  


**Author's Note:**

> Rexthranduil (obaewankenope on tumblr) kindly helped worldbuild an entire AU, so this piece may eventually get a follow-up, but I'm mostly living in the Star Wars 'verse at the moment, so no guarantees. But you can check out my tags on tumblr: [HP soulmarks AU](http://sanerontheinside.tumblr.com/tagged/HP-Soulmarks-AU).


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